Clare started to say more but his father raised a hand to cut him off, so that was that. As he gazed down through the trees the air seemed to shimmer with heat. The ham-and-butter sandwich he was eating tasted limp and salty, like it had been steamed, and a swallowtail butterfly seemed almost to stagger through the air. He unwrapped his second sandwich, but had no appetite for it. The butterfly landed on a thin, pliant bough and opened and closed its wings and suddenly Clare was thinking of the yellow meadowlarks that used to sit on the fence posts on the farm and sing with their black beaks wide open. He used to be able to whistle their squeaky, flutey, watery song, and that’s what he’d done to amuse Neva before Aldine came. He put his lips into a tight O and sucked in his breath. When he finished the ripple of notes, his father was staring at him, looking like his own ghost, and then he smiled a little. “I miss that,” he said.
Clare wrapped his sandwich back into its wax paper and went back to work. His arms were protected but you couldn’t pick with gloves on. There was nothing for it but to search out the next orange even while grabbing the one at hand, a process repeated again and again and again. He heard the rattle of his father’s ladder as he reset it against a nearby tree, but he wasn’t coughing. That was the good thing. It was hard to work or think or anything when he was coughing. The packinghouse would be better, sure it would, but it was hard to think of his father out here alone. He was like the monkeys on Monkey Island at the zoo in Independence, marooned by a moat and a fence, always looking out like they remembered where they used to be. He’d often heard his father talking to Hurd about wheat prices and rain, and then, no matter what Hurd said, his father would nod and conclude that things were about to come round again in Kansas. His mother said nothing even if she was within earshot of such talk. Charlotte couldn’t hold her tongue, though. She would always say she wouldn’t go back for all the tea in China except maybe to visit in her dotage and late dotage at that, and his father would light another cigarette and look out over the moat nobody else could see.
“I’d go with you,” Clare said on one such occasion and his father had glanced at him with soft eyes.
Clare trudged to the bin, drained his bagged oranges into it, and headed back up the row. He had just begun to set his ladder at the next tree when he smelled something wonderful in the air. Corn roasting, he decided. A Kansas smell. He left the ladder and followed the smell. He heard footsteps behind him—his father was coming, too. Just beyond the windbreak of eucalyptus, a line of smoke rose and curled. In the shadows a rough hut had been assembled from discarded wood and tin, and a girl sat tending the fire with a baby in her arms. She wore a blanket over her shoulders in spite of the heat. The smoke and the crackling of the fire must have masked Clare’s approach, but when a long piece of tree bark snapped underfoot, the girl’s head jerked around, and for one fleeting instant he thought that this was an animal wrapped in a shawl; that’s how alarmed and darting and feral her eyes were.
She stood to face them. The end of the long stick she held in her hand was blackened and smoking slightly. In her other arm, she held the wrapped baby. “Who’re you?” she hissed. Whatever his advantages in size and strength might be, they were lost to her ferocity.
Clare nodded toward his father and the orange trees behind them. “We’re picking the grove, ma’am, is all. Me and my dad. And I just smelled the good smell from your fire.” He smiled in hopes of disarming the girl, but her expression was unchanged.
“What’s your name?” she demanded.
“Clare Price,” he said and thought some kind of recognition flickered in her eyes.
“And that’s your father there with you?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She seemed to be making some kind of calculation.
Clare said, “I’ve got an extra ham-and-butter sandwich if you like that kind.”
The girl ignored the question. She kept the baby in one arm and the smoking stick in the other hand and then, as if having made some kind of decision, she stepped toward him in a way that made him want to move back. He didn’t, though. He stood fast.
“You want to hold my baby?” she said.
He did not want to hold her baby, but he thought it would be impolite to decline. “I’m not sure I know how,” he said.
“It’s easy,” she said. “You can’t hurt him.” She tossed the smoking, charred stick back toward the fire and taking another step forward, she presented the baby.
It was swaddled in a dirty blanket and he could not bring himself to take it, but he didn’t have to. His father abruptly stepped forward. “I’ve held a few infants,” he said, and then, taking the baby and peeling away the blanket, he said, “What is its name?”
“It’s Caleb,” the girl said, watching his father’s face. The girl’s eyes were bright. “Caleb Junior,” she added. “After his father.”
Only later would Clare make sense of her words. At the moment he barely heard them. He was staring in shock at the baby in his father’s arms. It was wooden and bluish and unmoving. When he then looked up at the stricken set of his father’s face, he knew he was right, that the baby his father was holding was not alive. His father pushed it back into the girl’s hands and, stepping away, almost fell. Then Clare turned and began to run. Not just him. Even his father. Behind them, the girl’s calls and laughter did not seem human.
64
Hurd said, when Ansel described the whole horrible encounter in the grove, that the Teagarten girl had given birth to a stillborn baby at home, which could happen to anyone, but the rest of it you could lay at Caleb’s door.
They didn’t say more about it because there wasn’t much else to say, and later Ansel took two sheets of onionskin paper from the desk near the time clock, folded them in threes, and slipped them inside his shirt. He meant to write his old friend Gil to find out about Aldine but as he walked, he thought, too, about one more letter to Aldine.
At the post office counter Ansel asked Bart Crandall for a stamp and envelope.
“Air mail or regular?” Bart Crandall asked in a neutral voice as if it made no difference to him, but it did. One meant This is routine and the other meant it was not. But Ansel didn’t care.
“Air mail,” he said, and took the stamp and envelope to a far counter. He unfolded the onionskin paper—it was spotted slightly with sweat. He took out his pencil but just held it. He could feel Bart Crandall’s eyes on him from behind, but he didn’t care. He stared out toward the street. The last time he’d composed from a post office, it was in Dorland and he had written the advertisement that Aldine had happened upon in New York City and used to make her escape, and now look what he’d done with her. He, Ansel Price, who had thought himself an honorable man.
For one long tantalizing moment, he thought he might think of what to say to her, but he could not. He addressed the envelope to Gilbert Dorado, of the Harvey House, Emporia, Kansas. Then he wrote:
Dear Gil,
Just checking on the new girl we brought you. Not much news about Kansas in the California papers. Everything all right there with Miss McKenna? Still got work for everyone? Plenty of avocados growing around here so let me know if Fred Harvey needs a case.
Your old amigo, Ansel